Thousands suffer in North Korea's hellish Gulag

North Korea makes international press headlines every time it explodes a nuclear bomb in the tunnels beneath its mountains or launches an inter-continental missile. The concern is more than justifiable: nuclear proliferation is a global threat. However, the phenomenon of systematic and widespread human rights violations that has transformed the entire nation into an open air gulag is almost completely ignored.

The guilt of the media’s silence has been repaired to an extent by the recent initiative of a group called “No fence”, an organisation based in Tokyo, that is committed to the liberation of the estimated 300,000 political prisoners who are languishing in North Korean concentration camps, subjected to torture, forced labour and executions.

With US President Barak Obama’s recent visit to the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, this group of citizens published an open letter urging the international community to denounce the North Korean gulag system, not only the nuclear threat posed by Pyongyang. If the world fails to recognise the horrors that take place under the dictatorship, the open letter reads, “We will be judged incapable of learning from past crimes against humanity, by future generations”.

The letter was signed by various human rights organisations and sent to 3,000 parliamentarians among the main group of industrialised nations.

South Korean secretary of the group “No Fence”, Soon Yoon-bok, is concerned by the fact that the Americans and Europeans, who are well aware of the brutality inflicted by Nazi Germany, particularly on the Jews, seem to be completely unaware of the atrocities taking place today in the North Korean prison camps. “The leader Kim Jong-il, says Soon, uses nuclear bombs and missiles to draw the international communities attention away from the vilest aspect of his dictatorship: the concentration camps”.

The terrible secrets of Mount Mantap

Kang Chol-hwan, a columnist with the South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo, in his analysis of the second nuclear explosion carried out recently by the North, reveals the true degradation of Pyongyang’s military regime. The bomb was exploded in a cave beneath Mount Mantap, a mountain that is 2000 metres in height and covered with dense vegetation. It is highly probable that the gruelling task of manually digging that cave was exacted from political prisoners.

Anh Myeon-cheol is a former North Korean concentration camp guard who fled to the south in 1994. He reveals that in the ‘90’s many young political prisoners were forced to build the underground bunkers of Mount Mantap. The prisoners were terrified by the mere mention of that mountains name. No one ever came back from that destination alive. At the time Anh was curious to know what type of work was being carried out there by these young dissidents. Now he knows.

Camp no. 16, reserved for political prisoners of note and their families, lies in the foothills of Mount Mantap.

North Korean students shy away from specialising in nuclear physics. Those who graduate in it are given no choice, they must move to Bungan, the district that is home to the Yongbong nuclear power plant, and their lives become that of a recluse.

“The whole truth, concludes Kang, will only come to light when the regime of Kim Jong-il falls, but it cannot be excluded that even now some terrible disaster could be taking beneath the shadow of that mountain”.

Pino Cazzaniga writes for AsiaNews.